On-line version ISSN 1851-3123

Abstract

This paper examines some of the features of the idea of an intellectual, accounting for the many nuances that its components enclose and the heterogeneous arguments that are elaborated in order to illustrate it. The development of the sections are based upon studies on the subject made by many analysts, and it reviews the changes attributable to the different historical situations, the vicissitudes of the relationship between intellectuals and politics, and especially, the difficult articulation between thought, democracy and inequality. As an illustration of the problematic ties which bind the university producers of knowledge with its own disciplinary field, the factors of power, the definition of their place in the struggles for the monopoly of knowledge and the means of orientation of collective life; the work includes an item on the conceptions of Argentine academics working in the field of sociology. In this case, data comes from in-depth interviews with professors- researchers developing activities in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. The findings aim to show that reflective thinking and power maintain unstable relationships that renew the debates about the role and reinstall the problem of the legitimacy of intellectual autonomy.